Funding agencies in Sweden (and Internationally) increasingly focus on and value publications in ISI listed journals. In this PDF you can find all the journals that are currently ISI listed. Below I have summarized the ones I consider most relevant for Software Engineering, and linked to their home page. I have excluded journals that are no longer in active use, or that was not active in the studied period of 2010-2014. I have also excluded the magazines IEEE SW, IEEE Computer, and CACM. No guarantees that I have not missed any journals though; if you find an error or have a suggestion for a journal that should be in here please contact me. Further down you can find "related" journals that might be of interest; software engineering is a multi-disciplinary field.

Method: I rank journals based on their median citations per year (YC) for a 5-year period, currently 2010-2014. I skip the last 2-3 years since papers need some time to start accruing citations. I exclude editorials, erratums, short (in DBLP section for short papers) and non-research papers. I include papers marked as industry papers or experience reports unless they are short. I no longer use impact factors since Thomson Reuters did not allow it and implied they could take legal action. But the impact factor is only based on a 2-year span of data, uses a mean which is not good for a highly skewed distribution like for citation counts, and is also only based on citations within the Web of Science, which excludes many relevant conferences etc. I'm pretty confident that the method I use is both more stable and better reflects actual citation patterns. Of course, it is another matter if more citations actually implies higher quality research but at least we can consider the number of citations a proxy value. It is also hard to find a good alternative, objective measure. YMMV.

More data, tables and visualisation to come later; this is just the first basic table. Follow me on Twitter if you want to stay on top of new changes: @drfeldt

How to read this table: YC means the Yearly Cites per paper and is the median of the number of citations that a paper gets per year since it was published. The IQR is the interquartile range, i.e. the range in number of citations per year per paper from the lower to the upper quartile. The MC is the mean number of citations per year per paper. We see that the MC is consistently higher than the YC since a few very highly cited papers skews the mean but not the median; we thus use the median (YC) for the actual ranking. The P0 is the percentage of papers for a journal that has no citations. As an example, we can then see, from the table below, that a paper in TSE gets a median of 6.7 citations per year, with 25% of papers getting less than 3.4 citations per year and 25% getting more than 13.0 citations per year, while 1.2 percent of TSE papers get no citations per year. Note how YC is quite intuitive and naturally normalized: TSE's YC of 6.7 means that for an "average" TSE paper you would expect it to get 6.7 citations per year while an "average" IST paper would get 4.5.

The statistics in the table above are based on a total of 3652 sampled papers out of a total of 3653, i.e. 100.0 percent, for the years 2010-2014. There might be some bias in the results since the missing papers are more likely to be ones that have had no citations. There might also be some bias since the number of citations per paper were not all checked at the same day. However we think neither of these potential biases are likely to have influenced the relative rankings of the venues.

Thanks to DBLP for their meta-data on SE journal and conference papers. We use DBLP data as a basis for selecting which papers to include in the rankings.

Below are more technically focused journals that might be relevant for specific parts of SE research. I have not yet collected stats for these journals so rankings might have changed in recent years.